Tag: Free your mind

Tonight has been a special night. I haven’t felt like this in years. Thank God I do. I haven’t felt this free in a while.

What happened was strange.

I kind of experienced a mental breakdown.

It started with these mental storms that I could not handle. I couldn’t stop thinking. I couldn’t.

I did not have control of my mind. It was as if my mind was a slave to itself. Whatever it wanted to do, it would, and I would let it.

But suddenly it hit me.

After hours of laying in bed and thinking and thinking and thinking, it clicked.

My mind was enslaved by the things I wanted. As a result, it could not be itself. It could not be what it was intended to be – a faculty for reasoning, knowledge, wisdom, beauty, meaning, and happiness.

But I was not giving my mind those things. Instead, I was feeding it meaninglessness.

It was like a trade off. If I wanted to continue desiring certain things, whatever they be, then I would have to sell my mind (soul) to meaninglessness.

In the movie, humanity was enslaved to a system that satisfied their desires. That system is called the Matrix. Those who did not unplug themselves from the Matrix – or, the fake world – were slaves to their desires, whereas Neo, Trinity and Morpheus (and their gang) were not. They were free.

They became free when they discerned the meaningless of the physical world and all the pleasures that come with it. True existence, they realized, lies in the spiritual world, or the world of the forms, as the ancient Greek philosopher Plato calls it. The world of the forms is where we find things like compassion, love, patience and other virtues.

But that’s not to say that the physical world doesn’t matter. It does. What I am saying here is simply that the intangible world means much more. It has much more meaning.

Therefore, the spiritual world should always sit higher on our priority list than the material world. Otherwise we become shallow, and ultimately, meaningless. It’s sad really, to think that we human beings, distinct from other animals with our free will, can reduce ourselves to animals and become enslaved to instinct and impulse.

What I decided tonight is that I prefer to be unplugged. I prefer to be free and enlightened instead of ignorant and enslaved. I prefer chasing truth over money, meaning over material, virtue over vice.

Just remember, it’s okay to have fun and enjoy the physical world too. But never let your desires alter your perception of reality. If ever you feel like a choice you are about to make is going to negatively alter your perception of reality, it’s because it is.